Nooks and Corners of the New England CoastDrake, Samuel Adams
History
Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast
Drake, Samuel Adams
New England -- Description and travel
Some time during the night a man entered the house, it is supposed for
the purpose of robbery. He fastened the door between the kitchen, which
he first entered, and the bedroom, thus isolating the sleeping women.
Karen, having awoke, cried out, when she was attacked by the intruder
with a chair. The noise having aroused the two women in the bedroom,
Mary Hontvet jumped out of bed, forced open the door leading into the
kitchen, and succeeded in getting hold of the wounded girl, Karen, whom
she drew within her own chamber. All this took place in the dark. Mary
then bade Annethe, her brother's wife, to jump out of the window, and
she did so, but was too much terrified to go beyond the corner of the
house. Mary, meanwhile, was holding the door of the kitchen against the
attempts of their assailant to force it open. Foiled here, the villain
left the house, and meeting the young wife, Annethe, was seen by Mary,
in the clear moonlight, to deal her three terrible blows with an axe.
But before she was struck down the girl had recognized her murderer, and
shrieked out, "Louis, Louis!"
After this accursed deed the man went back to the house, and Mary also
made her escape by the window. Karen was too badly hurt to follow. The
clear-grit Norwegian woman ran first to the dock, but finding no boat
there, hid herself among the rocks. She durst not shout, for fear the
sound of her voice would bring the murderer to the spot. There she
remained, like another Betty Moody, until sunrise, when she took courage
and went across the sea-wall to Malaga and was rescued. I was told that
when she fled, with rare presence of mind, she took her little dog under
her arm, for fear it might prove her destruction.
It resulted that Louis Wagner, a Prussian, was arrested, tried for the
murder, and condemned as guilty. The fatal recognition by Annethe, the
figure seen with uplifted axe through the window by Mary, and the
prisoner's absence from his lodgings on the night of the murder, pointed
infallibly to him as the chief actor in this night of horrors. To have
committed this crime he must have rowed from Portsmouth to the Islands
and back again, on the night in question; no great feat for one of those
hardy islanders, and Wagner was noted for muscular strength. It is said
he was of a churlish disposition, and would seldom speak unless
addressed, when he would answer shortly. He was not considered a bad
fellow, but a poor companion.
I went to the house. Relic-hunters had left it in a sorry plight; taking
away even the sashes of the windows, shelves, and every thing movable.
Even the paper had been torn from the walls, and carried off for its
blood-stains. Hontvet described, with the phlegm of his race, the
appearance of the house on the morning of the tragedy: "Karen lay dere;
Annethe lay here," he said. I saw they were preparing to make it
habitable again: better burn it, say I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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